The Texas BBQ Forum

I was doing a 24 hour cook on a 15 lb prime brisket and did something stupid by adding too many pellets to my smoke adder tray when it got past halfway burned.
My screwup looks to have been to pile the pellets higher than the walls of the snake which allowed the burn to jump to all three runs at once.
About ten minutes later I started smelling burning insulation tape and ran over to find the whole tray burning to beat the band.
Result was that it burned off the powder coating on the inside AND outside of the lid and overheated/fried the onboard temp sensor..plus probably infusing the brisket with whatever comes off of burning powder coat paint.
Good news is that a replacement lid and new temp sensor cost $65 delivered. One more A+ for CampChef..
The burn pattern was caused by the underside of the Campchef heat blanket I keep on it, which was melted a little on the underside but is still good to go.

Ouch!!

Russ

Oh wow! Glad it only damaged the cooker. Looks like you caught it soon enough.


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Wow, you're certainly fortunate there was no Bodily injury or further property damage.

I'm not familiar with those cookers so that's all I've got.

Different brand, but I had a similar run away last week, albiet I caught it before it reached your level.

My diagnosis, I put my smoke tube in the cook chamber too close to the temp probe shutting down the controller or confusing it. I had been smoking at low smoke for a couple hours, went out and changed it to 225. Few hours later I walked out and saw it was reading 375. I opened the lid and had flames licking around the diffuser plate. Pulled brisket and ribs off (after getting cooker further away from the house) and pulled the plug as the fan still runs if you turn it off. At this point the firebox was empty as was my smoke tube, but I had about 2 cups of pellets burning outside of the fire box that were being fanned....

A little water and scooped them out and restarted and the rest of the cook went well.

With the probe and the chimney on opposite ends, I have been putting a smoke tube(burning chips) closer to the probe so that the smoke didn’t go straight out the chimney.

I won’t make that mistake again. And yes my brisket flat was tough! But at least the ribs and wings were good!

Did it ruin the meat?

The burn damage inside the lid was worse than the outside, large pieces of paint peeled off down to bare metal so based on what I smelled (my first clue something was wrong) I tossed it all in the trash.
No idea what nifty stuff burning powder coat paint out-gasses but I would rather toss out $50 worth of meat than find out the hard way.